Evil isnt logical and isnt usually a help, when trying to cooperate. Cooeperation is pretty much necessary to create any endeavour.

Good can be evil if taken to an extreme.

All(or most) empires have endgoals that seem to be extreeme and thus, evil - as they subjugate all else - vide Cravers eating everything, Horatio beautifying people against their will. 

"you are using it to needlessly insult people."

Backtrack through this thread and try to find one actual insult, epithet, or pejorative. Take your time with it, and see what you come up with.

(Sarcasm is not a personal attack, it's just an indirect & acerbic way of making a point.)

CaptainCobbs wrote:

This thread isn't productive, you are using it to needlessly insult people for disagreeing with your opinion. Just because flame wars were common, doesn't mean they were in anyway beneficial to anyone involved nor did they accomplish anything. No one is driving you out because of your opinions, people are mad because you personally attack anyone who dares disagree with your dubious suggestion.

The thing is it is dubious AND unpopular. No one is in favor of creating the type of race he wants. Game2Gether is about player opinion carrying the sway. No one is with him but he keeps insisting that he somehow has a superior point of view and we just don't see it.

"No one is with him but he keeps insisting that he somehow has a superior point of view and we just don't see it. "

At least one person replied by saying that he also enjoys playing as a villain, and at no point did I ever say my opinion was superior to anyone elses- just that it was my own. The only thing I'm guilty of is not immediately recanting my viewpoint and conceding the superiority of *yours* the instant mine was contested- oh and also copy+pasting existing replies when a new person responds with a point that's nearly identical to an existing one because it saves times.

Could we please just agree to disagree?

OP expressed a wish to see a purely evil character or race in the game. Some people replied that that's not the way Amplitude writes its lore.

I and I think others too, get what OP is saying and the OP I think gets what the people disagreeing are saying too. Everything that comes after that is just petty squabbling over nothing really.

HuskOfKnowledge wrote:

Also, I concur with Emiscary, that real life and internet SHOULDNT be a world full of safe-spaces that are enforced upon everyone. Censorship and PC are hallmarks of all authoritarian states - be it right or left-wing. Great orators of their time like Cicero, pretty much all man of letters through the ages, ARGUED ALL THE TIME, using all tactics know to man to shirsmear their opponents. We can pretend to be evolved, yet Cicero and all others are hailed as somewhat ideal. They wouldnt be even known if it werent for their talent at shitsmearing others AND protecting themsleves and that took experience of attacking and defending themsleves  and never using those dreaded safe-spaces to talk themselves into a cozy warm corner of ther moms' dresses.

Look, you do what you want, I'll be enjoying reading the back and forth of low key insults from the shadows. I'm all for confrontation and I totally agree with what you said but from my personal perspective, I find it very hard to add anything meaningful to "debates" that consist of "pure evil villains are valid" "no they are not" "yes they are" "no they're not" "yes they are" and so on.

What you said in your post, I brought them up too. Reapers, Necrons etc. Even the evilest looking evil has motivations. Otherwise they're not interesting. But I was shot down. So what else can I say? I don't agree with the guy but I'm not gonna get into an endless and pointless debate after all the cards have been played.

But that doesn't mean I won't let others continue to do so in my stead if the participants decide to carry on. I'll be following the progress of this thread with great interest.

twimpix wrote:

Look, you do what you want, I'll be enjoying reading the back and forth of low key insults from the shadows. I'm all for confrontation and I totally agree with what you said but from my personal perspective, I find it very hard to add anything meaningful to "debates" that consist of "pure evil villains are valid" "no they are not" "yes they are" "no they're not" "yes they are" and so on.

What you said in your post, I brought them up too. Reapers, Necrons etc. Even the evilest looking evil has motivations. Otherwise they're not interesting. But I was shot down. So what else can I say? I don't agree with the guy but I'm not gonna get into an endless and pointless debate after all the cards have been played.

But that doesn't mean I won't let others continue to do so in my stead if the participants decide to carry on. I'll be following the progress of this thread with great interest.

This is more or less my perspective as well. This isn't a debate, this is a back-and-forth "yes, no" with a great deal of snarky sarcasm involved. It's quite fair to have a sarcastic note like that, but when all the replies turn into passive-aggressive jabs at each other, that's just not productive.

He may have a point, sorta. In Endless Legend the Morgawr are plain evil, as stated in by Jeff Spock in their focus video. And they are really good at it, I really hate them when they give me trouble and they are pretty powerful which makes good villians. 

Also, the Necrophages, unlike the Cravers, don't have to devour everything as they can farm. It's just they aren't good at it and they don't like being hungry. So they'd rather eat everyone all the time so they are always full because they can't control their hunger. And as seen in their faction quest and intro some of them do know what they are doing and are intelligent enough to learn that there's another way. Their faction leader however would rather "...turn our hunger against those trespassers would take it from us." Because they were the "first" making Auriga their planet I guess.

And don't the Mykara just want revenge on everyone because of the Ardent Mages.

TommyThunderbolt wrote:

He may have a point, sorta. In Endless Legend the Morgawr are plain evil, as stated in by Jeff Spock in their focus video. And they are really good at it, I really hate them when they give me trouble and they are pretty powerful which makes good villians. 

Also, the Necrophages, unlike the Cravers, don't have to devour everything as they can farm. It's just they aren't good at it and they don't like being hungry. So they'd rather eat everyone all the time so they are always full because they can't control their hunger. And as seen in their faction quest and intro some of them do know what they are doing and are intelligent enough to learn that there's another way. Their faction leader however would rather "...turn our hunger against those trespassers would take it from us." Because they were the "first" making Auriga their planet I guess.

And don't the Mykara just want revenge on everyone because of the Ardent Mages.

Those are great examples, not even threadwise, but worldbuilding-wise. So madness or just cold logic of civilized hunter-gatherers.  Endless Space alone has a great many of unique blends of ***possible*** villains, but few clear-cut villains as well as few clear-cut heroes. I guess there's really a niche to introduce a ES-Morgawrs, an evil counterpart to heroic goody two-shoes vaulters. 

Actually after thinking about the Morgawr, mainly playing against them, I love hating them. This is why people like 2 dimensional villains. Think of many favorite Disney villians, Scar, Jafar, Ursula, Maleficent, and many others. A good villian we love to hate, I know that sounds weird but it's because they are so good at it (being evil). And now I want not a new villian faction in Endless Space 2, but the return of the Morgawr. I want them to be the ones that took the grey owl but some surviving it and making those survivors even more powerful from the huge dust exposure of the explosion.

Also playing as the Morgawr is fun too, even if it's easy. Because you basically terrorize everyone. All because of a delusional view of freedom. They want absolute freedom which to them means that no one can have the power to take it away even if others are believers of freedom. Morgawr's mindset "We can't be free if anyone else is." Yes they have a reason but all 2 dimensional villians have one, but they're all wrong and some even know that, yet be evil anyway.

"He may have a point, sorta. In Endless Legend the Morgawr are plain evil, as stated in by Jeff Spock in their focus video. And they are really good at it, I really hate them when they give me trouble and they are pretty powerful which makes good villians.  "

That probably explains why they were my favorite faction in the game. lol

The Morgawr are evil to everyone else. But their actions are driven by paranoia, They were trapped, experimented on and broken and now after their traumatic experience believe the only way to avoid that again is to dominate all others, constantly ensuring you remain on the top. Do unto others before they do unto you!

Honestly its logical, you're always at risk of being harmed by those who are your equal, you can never fully trust anyone so get to a position where they cant hurt you. 

@MasterofMobius: Interesting to compare to the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za and Kohr-Ah in Star Control 2.

Half of the factions are cruel exploiters.What sort of bad guy do you want.Big devil man,lol.

Ashbery76 wrote:

Half of the factions are cruel exploiters.What sort of bad guy do you want.Big devil man,lol.

Essentially he wants factions that are cruel for the simple joy of being cruel. The justification for this is individuals (eg Hannibal Lector). It is harder to justify from an entire race perspecitve but here we are.

It's no harder to justify a race of beings that're characteristically cruel than a race that's characteristically: nonviolent, obsessed with science, rapaciously hungry- or any other characteristic.

See: the Skeksis, the Dark Eldar, the Uruks, the Dementors... it's a really long list.

Hey all,

This is a pretty interesting thread so I thought I'd throw my two cents in.

First off, I have to say that Hannibal Lecter as a reference is interesting, but ultimately not exploitable from my point of view. Can you really build a realistic (okay, realistic within the bounds of an SF universe) functioning society around this character? I don't see how. If you take any scenaristically credible villain, it's very difficult to create a entire civilization based on them. Sure, a cult or an operation like a James Bond villain could be argued... but a nation? With a functioning military and diplomatic corps and educational system?

You could maybe argue Palpatine in the Star Wars series is like this, but he basically ran an elite terror squad (Sith) and didn't even directly govern or even care to govern the mass of the population. That was left up to the remnants of the Senate and the local governors. Which makes his organization closer to the Umbral Choir, really, when you think about it ^^

My mental block with Emiscary's original desire is that we aren't just displaying an evil individual, but would have to build a political and social structure around the idea that "I like to do evil things and I do them because they are evil and it makes me happy". Not that they do things perceived as evil because they need to in order to survive (Vodyani), or that they do things perceived as evil because that is how they are genetically programmed (Cravers), but they make the moral choice consistently to be evil. I suppose you could spin it as a sort of racial purity obsession that allows them to condone torture and slavery, etc., but even that doesn't really answer the original concern--it is still rationalizing the acts viewed as evil, rather than reveling in them precisely because they are evil.

I suppose you could use Stalin as an example as evil (he killed 5-10 million people [directly or indirectly]), but he was one leader of a country and you can pretty much roleplay that country in the United Empire. On the other hand, if you view the US as a massive, evil, military-industrial complex built on world domination, you can also roleplay the UE that way...

But I really don't see a credible way to invent a faction with Emiscary-defined evil as its fundamental motivation and basis of its decision-making; I don't see how an entire culture could evolve with that as the central tenet of its behavior.

My two cents, as I said, but I can always be convinced otherwise...

-Slow